Organic chemistry uses lots and lots of names. Not only purely chemical names, but people’s names. This is so because the field is so broad that you need to name not only substances, that usually have two names, the official – from IUPAC rules – and the nickname, usually much shorter and easier to remember […]
Planes, ships, trucks and (most) cars run on different fractions of crude oil, composed of carbon chains of different length: Diesel (C 10 -C 22 ), kerosene (C 8 -C 16 ) and gasoline (C 5 -C 12 ). Despite their current supremacy, it is well known that fossil fuels will not be the energy […]
Molecular recognition is a critical process for many biological functions and consists in non-covalent binding of different molecules, such as protein-protein, antigen-antibody and many others. The host-guest molecules involved often show a shape complementarity, and one of the leading specification for molecular recognition is that the interaction must be selective, i.e. the host should strongly […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
You can read this article because I have used photonics in order to make it possible. It may sound futuristic, but photonics is a technology we use, one way or the other, on a daily basis. Photonic devices are analogous to those used in electronics, but with the electrons replaced by photons. Thus, photonics is […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
Some metals, alloys and transition-element salts exhibit a form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism. This occurs below a certain temperature, named after Louis Néel, when an ordered array of atomic magnetic moments spontaneously forms in which alternate moments have opposite directions. There is therefore no net resultant magnetic moment in the absence of an applied field […]
Two-dimensional materials, such as transition-metal dichalcogenides embedded in optical cavities, stand out as an excellent platform where strong light-matter interactions can be studied. Moreover, their band structures bring about nontrivial topological features, including the possibility of inducing some really interesting ones, like the polariton anomalous Hall effect. But, before getting into that let’s go through […]
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. As the catalyst itself takes part in the reaction it may undergo a physical change. Hence, if catalysts take the form of nanoparticles, any physical feature of the nanoparticle interacting with the reacting molecules may […]
Some heteropolymers can be designed to spontaneously self-assemble in complex pre-determined knotted structures. In the past, we referred to such designable heteropolymers as “bionic proteins”. Here we present an extensive study on self-knotting bionic proteins. As our everyday experience with ropes teaches us, knots form spontaneously in polymer chains of sufficient length and flexibility have […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
A quantum dot is a nanometric crystalline structure of semiconductor materials. In a quatum dot electrons are confined in a region of space, thus creating a well defined structure of energy levels that depends very much on the size and shape of the quantum dot. This structure resembles that of atoms, that is why sometimes […]
In the transition from a petrol-based society to a one based on bio-renewable resources, the replacement of aromatic chemicals is one of the most challenging issues. Nowadays, around 40% of the bulk chemicals belong to the aromatic category, and a myriad of products are derived from benzene, toluene and xylene. Aromatic molecules are present in […]